The Current Situation and Prospects of Mechanical and Electrical CNC Technology in China

In recent years, on the basis of introducing and digesting foreign CNC technology, China has produced CNC systems and CNC machine tools with proprietary copyrights. However, CNC systems above mid to high end are still mainly imported products. Studying the current status and future development direction of CNC machine tools and technologies will play an important role in developing mid to high end CNC products and further expanding the market share of CNC machine tools.

Rapid development of hardware technology in CNC systems

With the rapid development of integrated circuit and computer technology, new vitality is injected into the upgrading of CNC hardware technology. Modern CNC systems generally use Very Large Scale Integration, ASIC and DSP technologies. The widespread use of surface mount (SMT) and three-dimensional high-density technology in electrical assembly greatly improves the reliability of the system. High speed and high-performance storage technologies, such as flash memory and mobile storage (PCMCIAcard), are greatly convenient for users. Thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFTLCD) technology makes display devices tend to be flat, making it easier to install mechatronics and improve human-machine interfaces. As the core processor of CNC systems, high-speed RISCPUs with a bit or more are widely used to ensure high-speed and high-precision CNC machining.

Taking Japan's FANUC16i/18i and 160i/180i as examples, ultra small and ultra-thin controllers have been formed, with the main control board only the size of a business card and the main processor using a Pentium chip. CNC and servo adopt a 50M/S high-speed serial bus. Connect the I/O modules with optical cables and adopt a decentralized configuration, facilitating mechatronics integration. In terms of communication, PCMCIA memory cards are used for communication with external computers, or modems are used for telephone and human-machine communication.

The use of embedded hardware is expected to make CNC system hardware more standardized and serialized. The development cost of CNC systems will also decrease.